Roaming the Startup Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt I came across Teamly, a new web app designed to help businesses manage their employees better. Yes, I know that sounds familiar, but what I liked about it was that this was a super, super simple app compared to a lot of the feature-crammed companies out there in this space.
The issue here is that a lot of corporate systems for managing people are really not designed for small businesses. They are just too complex, being packed full of to-do’s, tasks and projects. So Teamly is out to try and makes all that performance monitoring way easier.
Founder Scott Allison, a former MD of telecoms provider abica, developed it based on the experience he had growing his last business quite quickly. The question he asked was, how is it possible to make sure staff are productive and effective and keep on top of deadlines without having to micro-managing them, as many managers end up doing? This tends to lead to a cycle of unhappy staff who feel like they are being watched over their shoulder, and managers who spend too much time managing and not building the business.
So in Teamly’s realtime stream you can see both priorities and goal setting for the individual in the maner of a kind of “real-time appraisal”.
There is already a model for this: U.S. based SuccessFactors has sales $200m in the enterprise space, so Teamly is attacking the mass smaller business market.
In addition Teamly has some similarities with an internal Google tool they use with their staff called Snippets.
Teamly is also poised to open a Bay Area office.
Introduction to Teamly from Teamly on Vimeo.